About this Site

I'm not asking you to believe anything. I'm asking you to consider, applying your own tools of thought to what you read. Regarding verification, today we no longer need a university library. We can google quotes, authors or narrow subject matter.

Regarding history, this is my attempt to help people acquire a reasonably accurate grasp of how we got to where we are today. Individual events take place within wider contexts. I try to describe these wider developments using specifics. I avoid the bigger generalizations, analogies, inevitable cycles, or inevitable ruinations. I belong to no religious tradition. I analyze political motives for what they are, without favor, recognizing my own history of conceptual failings. It's a story of humanity struggling with circumstance and with different perspectives.

This is my second website. My first I sold in 2015 to a British company that specializes in educational sites. I didn't want my summations to disappear with me and I needed the money.

Frank Smitha is an amateur historian who has developed a set of very impressive online world history interpretive essays that could be profitably used as a world history text book. They cover world history from antiquity to the present. The essays are impressive not only for their scope, but also for their balance and emphasis on the interconnectedness of history.

I've found in the work they describe some mistakes and typos which I've been correcting. (Being one's own editor can be a problem.)

I don't like being described as an amateur after twenty-five years or more of study and hard work – but okay. Professional historians are thought of as holding university positions. They publish their work on paper rather than for free on the internet. (Lately they have been attacked as elitists, but I respect all honest work involving historical research. I own two volumes titled The History of the World in Christian Perspective that were written with not enough research.)

If you find inaccuracy or false assumption in my work, maybe you would be kind enough to tell me about it here.

Formal education: Glendale Community College, Sociology at UCLA (1963-64); independent study of History at UC Berkeley, reading and researching what interested me — especially World War I — while engaged in political activity and employed part-time as a reprographer by the university (1965-73). After I left UC Berkeley I gave up my outsider romanticism and gave into my PhD wife's insistence that I at least get a BA, which I did, with honors, at California State University, East Bay, 1977.